The present invention relates to business-to-business marketing organizations who participate in lead-generation activities via their company website. More particularly, the invention provides a target lead-generation system and method that targets the right businesses using real-time predictive and behavioral analytics and website traffic data and connects businesses to potential customers and suppliers to drive business revenue. Even more particularly, the invention provides a system and method for real-time searching and matching of data input into website registration forms by website visitors, provides for real-time cleansing and appending of attribute rich company demographic and firmographic data to the website form and to the marketing database. The resulting information is then available for use by other systems such as marketing automation systems and CRM systems.
Business to business marketing (“B2B”) includes individuals and organizations that facilitate the sale of their products and services to other companies or organizations that often resell the products and services, or use them to support their own operations. Although the difference between consumer and business marketing may appear obvious, there are many distinguishing features between the two that often result in substantial differences in practice. For example, B2B marketing may often involve shorter and more direct channels of distribution. While consumer marketing often involves large demographic groups targeted through mass media and retailers, in B2B marketing the negotiation process between the seller and buyer is more personal in nature. Most B2B marketing includes a much more limited portion of promotional budgets dedicated to advertising than in consumer marketing. B2B marketing and sales is conducted through more direct promotional efforts, trade journals and sales calls. However, many of the principles of consumer marketing also apply to B2B marketing, such as defining target markets and matching product and service strengths to the defined target markets.
One of the more recent promotional endeavors of business marketing is through the Internet, involving offered services and products on organizations' websites. While popular in use, industry research has shown that of all persons who visit a B2B company's website, only 3% of visitors actively identify themselves via forms, thereby leaving 97% of web visitors to remain unknown. In addition, of the 3% that announce themselves, less than 15% fill out a form with complete and accurate information. This lack of information makes it very difficult to follow up a possible sales lead from a B2B website visitor based on insufficient information.
In addition to the need for information on businesses visitors to B2B sales and marketing websites to be provided to the sales and marketing funnel, quality data is needed by the business for use in marketing automation systems and customer relationship management (“CRM”) systems.
CRM systems and methods are used by organizations to provide a predictable and organized way for interacting with customers and potential customers. CRM often includes specially trained personnel and special purpose software. It is a combination of policies, processes and strategies implemented by an organization to unify its customer interactions and provide a method for tracking customer information. It often includes technology for identifying and attracting new and profitable customers as well as creating better relationships with existing customers. CRM involves many organizational aspects that relate to one another, including front and back office operations, business relationships and interactions, analysis involving target marketing and marketing strategies, and means for generating metrics for measuring the relative success of various marketing and sales efforts. It is a key component of modern marketing organizations. CRM systems include firmographic data, which includes characteristics of an organization often used for segment market analysis.
Marketing automation systems and methods are used by organizations to communicate with prospects and customers and automate many marketing communication tasks. Marketing automation often includes specially trained personnel and special purpose software. Whereas a CRM system is often leveraged as a database for the sales organization, a marketing automation solution is mostly leveraged as a database for the marketing organization. Furthermore, there is typically a link that exists between a marketing automation solution and a CRM system. Marketing automation is often leveraged to communicate with customers and prospects via email, track and report on campaign responses, profile the quality and sales-readiness of leads generated by marketing programs, prioritize which leads are passed to members of a sales team, and to automate ongoing communications to prospects not yet ready to purchase.
Therefore, quality data from customers is needed to be able to leverage and exploit marketing automation systems and CRM systems. One of the major drawbacks of many of the B2B sales and marketing products available today is the lack of data quality when generating existing and new customer contact data. A problem for B2B marketers is that a large gap exists between the need to capture rich business demographic and firmographic from new leads that complete online registration forms, and the need to keep registration forms short to reduce form abandonment. B2B marketers need accurate and comprehensive data to route leads to the right sales representative, segment & target their marketing efforts, and perform other lead prioritization and communication activities. At the same time, marketers also need to increase as much as possible the number of website visitors from their marketing programs who fill out their registration forms. Marketers have been forced to choose between shortening their registration forms to drive higher conversions (registrations), or require the registrant to complete too many fields, resulting in increased registration abandon rates and an increased average cost-per-lead.
Other challenges with registration forms are that the data that result after a customer/visitor enters information is often false or inaccurate data. This may be that a visitor makes errors providing its data, or may not know the correct answers required by the registration form. Another key challenge is identifying the true leads from spambots, automated computer programs designed to assist in the sending of spam that crawl Internet websites looking for registration forms and automatically enter fake data. Once a spambot finds a form, it parses and analyzes the form. The spambot then may fill them with unwanted information, hyperlinks and visuals that are intended to attract a target audience. This is often done to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.
Addressing all of these above-mentioned challenges has required manual efforts on the part of marketing organizations to sift through all of the forms submissions and attempt to correct inaccurate firmographic details and eliminate the false records. Manual methods of correcting inputted form data can be time consuming and can result in lost customer leads. If the marketing organization takes too long to qualify the leads, potential new customers may have already identified and elected to purchase the product or service being offered from another vendor which responds more quickly.
B2B marketing is at the beginning of a new era that heavily relies on the tight integration of inbound and outbound marketing initiatives. As this transformation happens, marketers need help increasing their conversions and accelerating their leads through the marketing and sales funnel for faster revenue growth. However, a huge gap exists between the need to capture rich business firmographic information from new leads, and the need to keep registration forms short. Marketers are forced to make a lose, lose decision: shorten their registration forms to drive higher conversions, but go without critical information, or require the registrant to complete too many fields, resulting in increased rates of abandonment of the web form entry by the registrant resulting in a higher cost-per-lead. Rich data attributes are required by their sales and marketing systems, as well as the critical customer and prospect insight needed to better manage opportunities through the sales and marketing funnels.
An ideal solution is one that provides as close to 100% accurate company information for a business visitor to a website. Such a solution is not trivial since less than 3% of website visitors are identified. Drawbacks of previous solutions include outdated and inaccurate information and the lack of a simple and cost-effective way to objectively and analytically identify and connect visitors with their companies so as to be able to target such companies for outbound marketing.
A solution is required that enables companies to accelerate conversions through their sales and marketing funnels by reducing the amount of information that a company requests on the web forms while appending the data needed to run their business behind the scenes and in real time. In doing this, customers see a sharp reduction in web-form abandonment leading to a significant increase in the percentage of visitors who progress through the registration cycle.
The solution presented herein is a multi-pronged approach that can leverage visitor-selected information, and/or IP address identification of the visitor, and/or a process that automatically matches company demographic and firmographic information to the company of a website visitor leveraging complex matching algorithms and a master data management platform. The result is a shortened registration form that delivers, invisibly to the website registrant, all of the information a marketer needs to run their business. Companies that have implemented the solution provided herein can achieve a more than a 50% increase in web-form completion and conversion rates and achieve more than a 30% reduction in their cost per lead.
It is also important to offer such solutions as Software as a service (“SaaS”). SaaS is a model of software deployment where a provider licenses a software application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS vendors may host an application on their own web servers or download the application to the customer device, disabling it after use or after an on-demand contract expires. By sharing end user licenses and on-demand use, investment in server hardware may be reduced or shifted to a SaaS provider. SaaS is usually associated with business software and is considered to be a low cost method for businesses to obtain rights to use software as needed rather than licensing all hardware devices with all applications. On-demand licensing provides the benefits of commercially licensed use without the associated complexity and potentially high initial cost of equipping each hardware device with software applications that are only used occasionally.